Tragedy grows in Brooklyn as questions emerge.

“When we walked into [his] house as kids, there was just a very eerie feeling in the air. It was not a nice place.” This is how a neighbor remembered going into Levy Aron’s family home in Brooklyn when he was a kid. What happened in that home?

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department stated a neighborhood woman told him that Aron had tried to lure her son into his car a year ago. How many children had he lured before? How many had he wanted to lure?

Parents on the block didn’t want their kids to go near him, said another neighbor, Chaim Lefkovitz, 39. A family acquaintance, Lee Vogel, 21, said, “There was something strange about him. You know when you see Charles Manson, he has that look in his eye? Levy had that look.” Why hadn't someone done something about him before?

Levy Aron, a 35-year-old loner who still lives in the same house with his father and uncle, confessed last week to kidnapping and murdering Leiby Kletzky, an eight-year-old boy who got lost while walking seven blocks from his day camp to meet his mother. Various reports since then have raised more questions than answers.

Aron said in his confession he saw Kletzky standing around in Borough Park, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He asked if he needed a ride somewhere and the boy, who was autistic, went with him. Did his autism make him susceptible?

Aron said he attended a wedding later that day, but witnesses say they didn't see the boy there. What did he do with the boy? The following day went to work. What did he do with the boy? Police say they saw rope marks on the boy's remains. Was he tied up that day? Aron said he suffocated the boy with a towel, then cut the boy's body up and put it in a dumpster. For some reason, he wrapped the boy's feet in plastic bags in his refrigerator. Why did he keep the feet?

At his arraignment Aron's lawyer, Pierre Bazile, asked for a psychiatric exam, pointing out that Aron was hearing voices and having hallucinations. During the proceedings, Aron giggled. These are all symptoms of schizophrenia. Why had his schizophrenia never been diagnosed and taken care of?

Recent research has linked schizophrenia with childhood abuse. Other research has shown that kids molested or abused during childhood often end up becoming molesters or abusers themselves. Leonard Shengold used the term, "Soul Murder," to describe severe abuse. Monsters, this research suggests, are not born, but made by monstrous childhood conditions. When a man has had his soul murdered as a boy, does he look for another susceptible boy on whom to displace his murderous rage?

Leibby Kletzky, the only boy among four sisters, was described by family friend Schmuel Eckstein as "a great kid. He's an angel." What would his future have been?

Aron dreamed of singing on American Idol, but his profile on MySpace listed only one interest, a movie called What is Love? Had Aron ever known love?

Questions arise about two tragedies in Brooklyn. One happened to a boy who grew up in a twisted house on Second Street. The other happened when that boy became an adult and met another boy in Borough Park. Tragedies that bring up many questions, but few answers. Meanwhile a family and a community must find the guts to go on.

Child abuse is linked with adult ailments

Recent research has demonstrated a relationship between childhood abuse and a number of adult ailments, including arthritis, depression, cancer, and psychosis.

The research, published in journals in America, Australia, Canada and England, notes the following connections:

· Adults who experienced physical abuse as children have 56 per cent higher odds of osteoarthritis compared to those who have not been abused, according to a study by University of Toronto researchers published in Arthritis Care and Research.

· Childhood physical abuse is associated with elevated rates of cancer in adulthood, according to another study by University of Toronto researchers to be published in the journal, Cancer.

· People who were abused and neglected during childhood have a higher risk of major depression when they become young adults, according to a report in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In addition, depressed men who were abused have ten times higher risk of suicide, according to an article in the British Journal of Social Work.

· Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London have published new research in The British Journal of Psychiatry which indicates that women with severe mental illness are more likely to have been abused in childhood that the general population.

· Childhood sexual abuse significantly increases the risk of developing drug and alcohol issues, mental illness and marital strife in men and women, according to a study in American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

This research underscores the long-term devastation caused by childhood abuse and shows links between it and a growing number of adult diseases and disorders. And it calls attention to a problem—be it physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—that has been escalating over the past decade.

For years, families swept childhood under the rug and some researchers believed that it had only limited long-term effect. Indeed, some researchers stated that a child could grow out of it once he became an adult. This new research shatters this mythology once and for all.

Although recent researchers don’t offer an explanation for the link between abuse and a myriad of illnesses, one can conjecture that any kind of child abuse engenders low self-esteem, bad coping method, and a pessimistic outlook on life. These three factors alone would predispose victims of child abuse to a number of illnesses. In addition, bad hygiene and physical posture associated with child abuse victims could explain the many cases of arthritis later on.

This research goes counter to recent trends to seek primarily biological explanations for mental disturbances as well as for physical ailments. It clearly shows that environmental traumas continue to have at least a partial effect on the development of adult problems.

Maybe, just maybe, by focusing on the many long-term effects of childhood abuse, we may at last be able to come up with some preventative measure that will help us to diminish or even eliminate it from our culture. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Why does a mother beat her child to death?

A few weeks ago the mother of a 4-year-old Brooklyn boy was arrested along with her boyfriend for the savage slaying of her child. Myrna Chen Phang, 25, and her boyfriend, Steven Dadaille, 26, were charged with pummeling Jayden Lenescar with their fists and with a belt buckle during a two day spree of violence. When Phang finally called 911, after leaving the boy in the bathtub fighting for his life all that time, it was too late. He died on the way to the hospital.

The question everybody is asking is why? Why would a mother do this to her little boy?

The information about the case is sketchy and doesn’t provide concrete answers. Phang and Dadaille told an unnamed source, quoted in the Daily News, they were angry at the boy for touching himself. “They said they warned him not to touch himself and he went ahead and did it, so they threw him in the bathtub, threw cold water on him and began hitting him with the belt.” The source said Phang beat him first and then Dadaille took the belt away and began hitting the boy harder, complaining that Phang was being much too easy.

Rosa Adrien, a friend of Phang’s, said Phang spoke about spirits taking over her body. “She said something came over her, almost like a spirit. She said she didn’t know why she let it happen.” Adrien blamed Dadaille, noting that he was “a voodoo devotee.” Phang was recently separated from her husband, Mackenzy Lenescar, and had taken an order or protection out on him. Apparently the separation was not amicable.

From these sparse facts we can speculate on what might have caused Phang to lose her temper and beat her son to death.

First, there was the recent separation, accompanied by the order of protection. If a woman takes out an order of protection it is usually because she is frightened of violence against her. Sometimes she is also angry with the spouse. In such cases, the fear and anger get displaced onto their son. The boy becomes a symbol of the hated spouse and a reminder of him.

In addition, her present boyfriend, Dadaille, was reputedly a “devotee of voodoo.” While this is only second-hand information, we do know from several sources that he complained that Phang was too soft on the boy. Perhaps he had his own anger that got taken out on the boy. And his anger would have infected her anger.

This would explain a loss of temper. However, when we consider that Phang told her friend Adrien that “something came over her, like a spirit,” we may conclude that the rage that took hold of her was all out of proportion to the present situation. What this brings to mind is “transference.” In psychoanalysis, transference refers to a process in which repressed feelings (rage) toward a primary figure (a father) suddenly break to the surface in a present situation and get directed at that situation. Was Phang herself abused as a child? Research shows that abused children become abusive parents.

We can never know for sure what happened in that small apartment in Brooklyn, but we can know that it should never have happened, and we should never stop looking for ways it could have been prevented.

Should parents be licensed and trained?

Vegetarian parents starve their baby to death….Mother drowns her five sons….Teenage mother throws newborn into the garbage….Toddler beaten to death by stepfather….Girl molested by father….Boy suffers brain damage from abuse.

These are some of the headlines we see in the news daily. Incidents of infant and child abuse are on the rise in America. The National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect notes that child abuse has tripled in America over the past three decades. And these are just reported cases. It is estimated that the majority of cases are never reported, because they happen behind closed doors.

And many more cases of emotional neglect also go unreported as well, yet are equally devastating to those individuals involved.

To address this problem, Jack C. Westman and Charles D. Gill wrote a book called Licensing Parents: Can We Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. The authors have verbalized what many in the profession have been advocating for years.

We require licenses and training for people who want to drive a car, and we require them for people to get married. The skills required to be a parent are much more complex than the skills required to drive a car. And it is certainly more important to society to have skilled parents who can raise well-adjusted children than it is to have skilled drivers who can drive safely on our highways.

How would this work? Parental licensing and training could be administered by government agencies. Newly pregnant women and their spouses (or boyfriends) would be required to register and sign up for psychological testing, parenting classes and counseling.

The testing would be a way to weed out those parents who are too emotionally disturbed to care for children. Classes and counseling would ensure that all parents would receive training and insight into themselves. One of the most important parenting skills is self-analysis: parents must be able to look at themselves objectively to understand how their own behavior is affecting their children. They need to understand how they displace violence, depression or anxiety onto their children.

Despite the rise in child abuse, a large percentage of the populace will oppose parent training and licensing. People say it would be yet another government infringement on the rights of parents—“Big Brother is watching!” Parenthood, some feel, is a sacred right that should not be interfered with by the state.

Either we interfere with parents and monitor their child rearing, or parents are going to interfere with society by producing a slew of abused and neglected children who later become maladjusted and dysfunctional adults.